This invention has as its object a process for compression of a data set corresponding to successive measurements of the same physical magnitude over a predetermined period. The invention relates to any quantifiable activity that varies over time, regularly measured, and relatively often, for example every hour.
The analysis of the successive values of the magnitude measured, for example to determine daily, weekly, or other cycles, by a human operator quickly becomes impossible considering the volume of measured values. The latter are therefore unusable.
The number of magnitudes measured is particularly great in a telephone system. A telephone system is composed of nodes, consisting of automatic through switches or subscriber automatic switches, and connections between these nodes, consisting of beams. For a good management of the resources of the system, it is important to know the load level of each element of this system. Therefore, traffic measurements on each beam and traffic measurements of the automatic switches are regularly made, for example, every half hour or every hour.
More specifically, for a subscriber automatic switch, the outgoing traffic (corresponding to the calls of the subscribers connected to this automatic switch), the incoming traffic (corresponding to calls intended for subscribers connected to the automatic switch), internal traffic (corresponding to a telephone call between two subscribers of the automatic switch), or the like are measured. The data measured is stored in a computer and is published either periodically or on demand.
The publication of the set of data measured on a single automatic switch for a month represents a hundred or so pages. Obviously, it is too large a volume of data for a human operator to be able to use this data. It is therefore necessary to compress the stored data before presenting it to a human operator.
In the particular case of the observations of traffic in a telephone system, a process is used, according to the known art, of rough filtering based on the computation of a monthly representative value and of an annual representative value of each magnitude measured. These values make possible a very significant compression of the measured data but preclude any fine analysis of a magnitude measured, for example the study of daily or weekly cycles.